Keeping your personal information private

Tagged Surveillance

Email… not secure, not elegant, and not going anywhere. Make your peace with it! I am sure that by now you have heard about at least one person whose email account has been hijacked, hacked or whose emails have fallen into the wrong hands. But enough with the scare mongering… If you want to learn…

The EU considers US surveillance a “grave threat” to EU sovereignty. Rightfully so, as all data stored in public US clouds is subject to mass surveillance by US authorities. The EU considers personal privacy a fundamental right of any European citizen, which is obviously incompatible with warrantless mass-surveillance (FISA), as recently reauthorized for another 5…

A friend told me “Paranoia is a good thing, especially if you are being followed.” Apparently Americans, and very likely the rest of the world’s population, have good reason to be paranoid. In 2011/2012 the empire struck back, showed its teeth and the surveillance state was dragged out into the open. US mainstream media was…

When it comes to privacy, Facebook is on a mission to eliminate it at all cost. The now publicly traded company is every marketing company’s and spy agency’s wildest dream come true, gathering information about social relationship and intimate details of more than a billion active monthly users. Knowing Facebook, Google and cohorts are collecting…

All emails from anyone within the United States are stored by the NSA and other US government spy agencies for later retrieval if you “somehow” become a person of interest, says William Binney, former NSA crypto-mathematician. This blanket surveillance will allow government agencies to construct a scaringly accurate picture of your life from around 2002…

Senator Patrick Leahy, who previously introduced a bill that would have actually granted greater protection of your privacy, is re-introducing said bill for discussion on the senate floor next week. The new version however, would allow 22 government agencies access to your email without requiring a judge or informing the owner of accessed email accounts.…

Canadians may soon have surveillance right in their bedrooms if the Chiefs of Police Association gets their way in parliament… No quite yet, but it would be easy to imagine…. The Chief’s of Police Association of Canada is resurrecting a Internet Surveillance bill that would allow law enforcement to intercept Internet communication of anyone in…

George Orwell was right and the attack on our freedom comes from within! The UN calls for “Anti Terror” Internet surveillance and in the UK the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) succeeds in forcing ISPs to block access to torrent sites CNet reports. Independently viewed these news snippets don’t mean much, but in the context of the global…

The FBI denies being the source of the UDIDs that Antisec leaked earlier this week, so where did the data come from? With the US government having a history of being less than truthful about it’s surveillance programs and no way to verify Antisec’s claims at this time, the origin of the data is anybody’s guess. While the leaked UDIDs appear to have little value, thanks to Antisec releasing data stripped of identifying information, Apple and Google have been secretly storing a year’s worth of location information on user’s devices, and in Apple’s case backing this data up to user’s…

Last night Antisec has released about 1 million unique identifiers (UDIDs) from Apple iOS devices as reported on several news sites this morning. As scary as that may sound it is not clear what security or privacy implications this hack will have, as nobody seems to know what one could potentially do with this information. If you are concerned you can check your UDID(s) against the database of leaked UDID(s) here. Antisec didn’t release all 12 Million UDIDs they apparently had access to and withheld identifying information. While I understand the FBI tracking a certain number of people, I am not quite…